Yeah, to name just a few, there are the city/suburbia-dwellers driving large trucks, the people who collect guns because it gives them a (largely false) sense of security, and the rabid homophobes. (It has always puzzled me what exactly this last category is afraid of. Outside of prisons, I haven't heard a lot about gay men raping non-gay men, and even in the hypothetical case that that was an issue, one would think allowing them to marry would decrease the problem. Or could it be they are afraid of being "turned gay" or outed themselves?)
I used to think like you when I was a kid. Then I discovered reality is more nuanced and the science on this is surprisingly soft.
Nervous system morphology: yes, arthropods' nervous systems surely looks different from ours, with one large ganglion in the head and multiple somewhat smaller ganglia controlling motoric and digestive functions. But to conclude from this that they can't possibly feel pain is a huge leap of logic. An insect brain is organized much like a crustacean's brain, and a crustacean's brain is capable of complex behaviour.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=clever-crustaceans
Nervous system organization: suppose you want to argue that our nervous system not only look different, but is organized differently, with everything centralized, as opposed to different ganglia taking care of different functions. Well, the differences are not that huge. Have you ever seen a freshly beheaded chicken? I can tell you, some of them run like hell - a sight so spooky that you won't easily forget it. This is because the act of running originates from the spinal cord, which is still there when you cut off the head. Similarly, it is speculated that the human spinal cord plays an important role in coordinating monotomous tasks such as walking. And the number of neurons associated with coordinating our digestive tract is larger then the number of neurons in a rat, and comes surprisingly close to the number of neurons in the cerebral cortex of a dog. http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=gut-second-brain http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_animals_by_number_of_neurons#Cerebral_cortex
That bring us to Nervous system size. The above shows that a large structure of neurons is no guarantee for intelligence. On the other hand, there are many studies showing that corvids like crows and magpies show surprisingly intelligent behaviour on a smaller budget of neurons than our digestive system or a dog...
My point of all this is that neither brain size nor morphology or organization necessarily equates to complexity of function. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pain_in_invertebrates#Central_nervous_system
What does, then? We do not know! And we know even less whether bees can feel pain; nobody ever became a bee and wrote a book about it. The thought of not knowing this might feel threatening to your ethical preconceptions, but it's the hard truth! To make matters worse, the more we learn, the more it looks like some if not most invertebrates are able to experience pain at some level. Funny that we were just talking about administering electric shocks to honeybees: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pain_in_invertebrates#Conditioned_suppression
Now the interesting question is: how to build a system of ethics on this (lack of) knowledge. This I cannot answer for you, but the solution I use for myself is attributing gradual weights to the torture of different animals, with molluscs falling into the lowest tier, small insects a bit higher, large crustaceans a bit higher, birds and small mammals a bit higher and "intelligent" mammals even higher. The most important element of my system of ethics is that even the lowest tiers have a nonzero weight and torturing them for no good reason should be avoided.
Regardless of all the above soft ethics, there's a hard reason why "bee-tox" is a horrible idea. There already is a shortage of honeybees to the extent that fruit farmers start worrying about pollination: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Co
Oooh now I get it! You ACs are just like the Smurfs. Pedantic AC, First Post AC, Microsoft Shill AC, Ignorant AC, AWG Denialist AC, Treehuggin' Hippy AC, Crazy Libertarian AC,... And all the ACs that don't have specific names are just collectively referred to as "The Trolly ACs".
Oops sorry, I was confusing "phlogiston theory" with something else - it's a long time ago since I encountered the term so I should have looked it up to refresh my memory. But my point is: there were a lot of theories predating present-day thermodynamics, all making increasingly accurate predictions. Industrial steam engines were ubiquitous by the time the concept entropy was introduced into the field of thermodynamics; the lack of this concept (which is the "universal driving force" in present-day thermodynamics) didn't stop these steam engines from working - within design specifications! So despite my ugly mistake, my main point that older theories made a lot of correct and valuable predictions still stands. No, this doesn't go for phlogiston theory, but comparing modern climate science with phlogiston theory was a very, very long shot to begin with. To claim otherwise would be to show a fatal lack of understanding of present-day science and scientific knowledge.
I was not referring to the building of new coal plants but to the increase in mining and burning of coal since the "panic shutdown" of most of the nuclear plants. And I admit it's a bad example for a lot of reasons; primarily that the increase can be seen as a temporary spike following decades of decrease, and that the percentage of German electricity that comes from coal is still way below the US. That's kinda my point. The EU is far ahead of the US by any reasonable measure yet has failed to return to the stone age as rally2xs asserted.
The USA has made the greatest headway into actually reducing CO2
Numbers or it's wrong.
Also, cap-and-trade did work very well for sulfur emissions - no end of the world as we know it. You're saying "it harms prosperity" yet I have seen nothing like that happening yet; what has been harming prosperity so far is a long recession that could perhaps have been avoided and that not even the most rabid oil industry lobbyist is blaming on environmentalists. They would just lose credibility. Like you - I finished reading your post concluding you're living in a fantasy world.
No, it is (most of) the denialists who are the Luddites, for denying that our current technology has the ability to mitigate the problem without significantly impacting society, and for opposing all progress in that direction.
Quantum mechanics is a bit new -- including it in your absurd list is dishonest as it hasn't had time to fail spectacularly like history suggests it will. Gravity: obvious examples are obvious. If you're particularly thick, just google "history of gravity". Atomic theory: dramatically changed several times pre and post Einstein. The atom today is so dramatically different from the atom in, say, 1850 that I'd say the science of the time was "spectacularly wrong". Thermodynamics: phlogiston, caloric theory, need I go on?
Shoot, I took the bait! Did I spring the trap?
Yes you did. All these "spectacularly wrong" theories you're quoting were remarkably accurate in predicting every-day observables. That's why they established a strong foothold before getting disproven by theories which got disproven in turn... based on increasingly far-fetched measurements as far as practical every-day life is concerned. Examples:
- One can be a successful structural or ballistic engineer using only Newton's laws of motion and gravity, no relativity needed
- Phlogiston and caloric theory explained and helped develop a host of working applications
- People may disagree on this one, but one can get quite far in, say, organic chemistry or molecular biology with very little knowledge of quantum mechanics. Really! This is my field of study.
We know our current climate models are not perfect. We also have good indications they get close enough for their predictions to be of practical value. In other news, the world is not black-and-white.
Still, these models were not without merit. Bohr's atom model made a whole array of remarkably accurate predictions, and is still being taught in schools because it's a useful tool for thinking about atoms and chemistry. If you think the current climate models are about as accurate as Bohr's atom model, then you'd better start working on a reduction in CO2 output or looking for real estate in a future hospitable region.
Also, the speed of sound was an engineering problem/challenge. If your engineering is not up to it, you'd better not go there. Airplanes have a Vne (never exceed speed), and for a while, it seemed like no amount of engineering could push this value into the transonic region. Exceeding the Vne is a common cause of accidents and deaths. If you want to use this as an (admittedly bad) analogy for climate change: since we don't have proven effective means of reducing global temperature to levels that won't have a grave impact on society, we'd better not go there. Or to add another generous scoop of hyperbole: will human civilization end up like this?
You might want to note the question mark. Not to mention reading a few posts up in the thread. GP brought in an argument GGP utterly failed to address, hence the quip.
Strawman, strawman and more strawman. No environmentalist I know has ever said we should stop producing CO2 overnight, not that we should go back to the stoneage. The real-life solutions are a bit more nuanced than what can be captured in a soundbite. For solutions that work, look at the EU as a whole. Yes, progress has been uneven both geographically and in time, with for example the current anti-nuclear scare in Germany leading to a shameful boom in coal power. But they're still emitting much less CO2 per capita than the US. And so does the EU as a whole, while having a similar spectrum of climate zones. And all the while, EU civilian infrastructure is being maintained much better and is generally more technologically advanced than what I see here in the US. I think we should coin a new term "CO2 reduction alarmist". Who is the alarmist now?
Um, that's not quite how orbital mechanics works. Helios II started off from the earth - that is, with a lot of potential energy in the sun's gravitational field. It was put into an elliptical orbit around the sun, so on its closest approach, part of that potential energy was converted to kinetic energy (hence the high velocity), but at the most distant point, it's all converted back to potential energy, and there's zero gain. It's a bit like bouncing a rubber ball off the floor: it's surely going to hit the ground at a high velocity, but it's never going to bounce up higher than it started - no free lunch. The reason why slingshotting between planets works is because they move relative to each other. To use the rubber ball analogy again, if you throw a rubber ball at the front of a truck that is rapidly approaching you, the rubber ball will come back with a higher velocity. What you did is subtracting kinetic energy from the truck, just like a slingshotting probe subtracts kinetic energy from a moving planet. The tricks we use to make space probes gain kinetic energy are not unlike bouncing a rubber ball repeatedly between moving walls. To use the sun for slingshotting, one would require a very massive object in a highly eccentric orbit around the sun as a "second wall", which our solar system unfortunately doesn't have. (Or should that be: fortunately for our existence?) One could try to use pluto, but I doubt it's massive, eccentric and fast enough to be worth it.
Disclaimer: the above explanation is obviously somewhat oversimplified.
I call bullshit on this whole story. The letter frequencies are nicely consistent with a random OTP and woefully inconsistent with shorthand (which Mr. Young claims it is). 6 Q's, 4 X's and 4 Z's as opposed to 5 T's and 4 E's? Gee, there must have been a lot of Queens, Xylophones and Zebra's involved in that war! This alone is sufficient to sink the whole claim. And then there's the little problem that the story is shock full of holes:
- Mr Young claims they're using WWI-era codes. What makes him think this would be tolerated, in a war in which both sides were heavily reliant on encryption and codebreaking?
- A WWII artillery observer using carrier pigeons? Seriously??? We're talking about a very mobile war, with widely available radio equipment, and during which radar, jet engines, ballistic and guided missiles, and the atom bomb were invented. By the time the pigeon found home, the target could have moved 100miles. Yes, carrier pigeons were still used, but mainly in a backup capacity, and most certainly not for artillery observation missions.
- Why would the official codes use "panzers" and "jerries" as opposed to "tanks" and "germans/enemy"? Also, I'm not sure the word "blitz" was colloquial in allied countries before the end of the war. And it's used in a wrong context.
- "Counter Measures [against] Panzers Not Working?" There's so much wrong with that sentence I wouldn't know where to start. Not to mention all the other sentences he "decrypted". The guy has a lot of fantasy, I give him that.
Your country must be more civilized. Where I live, the freeloaders are everywhere.
Now you're sounding like the populist politicians and the bitter working-class people complaining in the pubs. What you need to do is show statistics indicating that your government's budget is being brought onto its knees by unemployment benefits. I'm not saying there exists no country for which this is the case, but I'm pretty sure it isn't the case for any of the Northern European countries I was talking about, contrary to pervasive public perception.
You start at $0.00, and work for your money.
In order for the system I was talking about to work, the unemployment benefits should be far enough below the minimum wage to motivate a large enough percentage of people to work (which means relatively high minimum wages). In practice, it is not that simple, and there will always be groups of exceptions. But this condition is largely fulfilled in most functioning welfare societies, again, despite pervasive public perception to the contrary. If you will argue that it isn't the case for your country, by all means, but please do provide a statistic. Keeping in mind that anecdotes are not a statistics; as I said, there will and should be groups of exceptions.
Your "you start at $0.00" brings us to a fascinating (if somewhat offtopic) aspect of the discussion. There is a political fringe group in the European Union that argues that everyone should receive the same basic unemployment package, whether they work or not. The package would allow people to have a healthy life, but not much luxury (small dwellings, no car, not all the latest newest gadgets,...) If you want to bring some luxury into your life, get a job. Labor would be very cheap for the employer because they don't need to pay you a full wage, only the difference between the baseline and a more wealthy lifestyle. The government would get all the money to pay everyone's baseline from very high VAT. This VAT would apply to imported goods, but not to goods that are exported and sold on other markets, which again would make manufacturing very competitive. Now I haven't performed or encountered a full economic analysis of this scheme, and I'm taking these people's claims that the scheme is vetted by economists with a huge grain of salt. So I don't know what to make out of it, but here are a couple of random thoughts:
- Very high VAT would spawn a flourishing black market. The economic force behind this black market may (or may not) be strong enough to make the whole scheme collapse.
- Possibly a more feasible way to get the money would be a combination of VAT and tax on production. I strongly suspect a working combination would be a VAT rate close to present-day welfare states, and the remaining tax on production would make your industries just as competitive as present-day welfare states (not very competitive but hanging in there, that is). You're just swapping labor costs and tax on labor for tax on production, and the outcome would not be all that different.
- The most interesting part of this cranky scheme comes in when one considers a future society with advanced AI and robotics, in which a lot of work can be done by robots. A large percentage of people would be unemployed; it seems logical to somehow pay them from the money made by factories that are largely human-free. Otherwise, what good is human-free production if nobody can buy the goods?
- Hypothetical counterpoint: people will always find a way to offer a service that other people will want to pay for, and no amount of technological advancement will change that. Think of the massive entertainment industry, which was largely nonexistent (or at least way smaller) in pre-industrial society.
Again I'm neither in favor or against this scheme, and I'm not sure of the truth value of all the above arguments. At this point, I just see it as a fascinating thought experiment. I guess I'll make up my mind once more information is available.</offtopic>
Where did you ever get the idea that the probability is 100%? It is very very close to 100%, yet there's an unimaginably small but nonzero chance that the sun will swallow the earth before the latter is hit by the next big asteroid. Unless of course you believe in some kind of prophecy that the earth will be hit by a big asteroid, then you're right... within the framework of your belief system. Which you should have stated before wasting our time on this discussion.
I think you underestimate the impact of greed, strife and group-think. It's basically what consumerist/capitalist society is built on. You bombard people the whole day with advertisements that all carry the same message: If you buy this, you will be happy. [Take-home message: money creates happiness.] You will be superior to your neighbor who doesn't have it. Or go ahead and don't buy it, but you will be ridiculed and feel inferior and unhappy. These messages fall on fertile ground: they trigger people's instinctive tendencies to appear superior as to attract a better mate. Few people can resist these base tendencies, leave alone the tsunami of adverts enforcing them. If this wasn't true, rich people would retire to enjoy life once they hit the $10M mark.
Surely, there will be some freeloaders, but so what? All they're doing is sidetracking themselves from society (and who knows, maybe one or two of them will turn out to be great artists). As long as that free shack is not overly luxurious, the number of freeloaders won't be too big, and society can handle it. That's why all these socialist countries in Northern Europe with their elaborate social safety net and unemployment benefits show no signs of collapsing (no, Greece is not in Northern Europe and is not a good example; what really brought Greece down is corruption and uncontrolled spending and also corruption and a bit of corruption.) Working-class people will be complaining in the pubs about the freeloaders, but in truth, they're really not a threat as long as their numbers are kept low by motivating them to get a job.
Here's also the big distinction between Communism and modern-day western-European Socialism (or let's use the less ambiguous term Social democracy). Communism does not sufficiently allow/motivate people to "become more" than their neighbor, thus denying human nature; therefore, it is doomed to fail. On the other extreme end of the spectrum, you have the laissez-faire doctrine of economic liberalism, as embodied in the US by ultralibertarianism, neoliberalism and neoconservatism - yes, that's all the major present-day US political movements with the (largely irrelevant) exception of the greens. This is also doomed to fail: throughout history, wealth has always found a way to aggregate, and a society that is not set up to effectively counterbalance this aggregation will eventually destabilize itself (ie. the poor and powerless will riot against the rich and powerful). As a result of all US political movements going full throttle for laissez-faire economic liberalism, income inequality in the US is at its highest value since a long time (and so is money's political influence). In my opinion, this is the single biggest threat to the USA and everything it stands for. The stable point lies in-between communism and laissez-faire capitalism. Progressive taxes are a large part of this because they promote a large middle class layer - people who have spending power (as opposed to the poor) and are motivated to spend all their money (as opposed to the rich). The associated turnover of money is the water that flows trough the waterwheel of a healthy economy.
Fine, if you're one of those people who are not willing to accept that the decisions we make are the results of the firing of our neurons, which is governed by cold, hard and well-understood physics, then just forget about the coin toss and focus on the lottery machine. I can give you the positions and velocities of the balls, the timings, and any other parameters you need with a 10^-5 relative error, and you still won't be able to predict the outcome even with the best simulation software. Why? Because it's a chaotic system, and a 10^-6 error can completely change to outcome. And guess what is also a chaotic system? Orbital mechanics. You can predict it a little bit into the future, but the further you go forward in time, the more the arbitrary small errors in your initial measurements are amplified, and after a certain time, it's just all random for practical purposes.
However, all of this is missing the point. What really matters (which you yet again conveniently ignored), is that
(1) the distribution of the outcomes can pass for random
(2) we can't predict the outcomes
These are sufficient conditions to approach the outcome as random for practical purposes. You already conceded (2), and as for (1), as I pointed out in another post, physics and statistics says that there should be no periodicity in large meteor strikes on the time scales we're talking about. The available geological data seems to confirm this. Up to you to demonstrate statistically significant periodicity. And get it published in Science or Nature.
I apologize if my reply was a bit harsh. Being a professional scientist myself, I seem to have lost at least some of my ability to simplify matters for the sake of broad understanding, or recognize it when others do. And indeed, what you said was strictly spoken not wrong, it just wasn't the complete picture or the point I was trying to make.
Yummy actually. If you've never eaten a real salami (ie. one that has been subjected to controlled fermentation), then you simply don't know what salami is supposed to taste like.
Yes, and the energy wasted by an inefficient power supply is likewise 100% converted to energy. But the thing is: a heat pump can go higher than 100%:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_pump#Coefficient_of_performance_.28COP.29_and_lift
It can do that because it's not a closed system - it pulls heat from outside (yes, even though it's colder outside) to inside in addition to dissipating electric energy.
As for the burning, well if you're lucky to live in a place of the world with a large percentage of renewable electricity, you can always argue that consuming electricity is better. But a lot of electricity in the world is generated by burning stuff, and the conversion of heat to electricity is limited by the Carnot efficiency, so right there, you're wasting more heat than what goes up the chimney at home (unless you're doing cogeneration). And then there are also the (admittedly smaller) losses caused by carrying that electricity through several kilometers of copper cables.
Slashdot Mirror
d) the fertilizer value of their corpses (which often seems to exceed a) and c))
You, sir, owe me a new keyboard. +1 touché
Yeah, to name just a few, there are the city/suburbia-dwellers driving large trucks, the people who collect guns because it gives them a (largely false) sense of security, and the rabid homophobes. (It has always puzzled me what exactly this last category is afraid of. Outside of prisons, I haven't heard a lot about gay men raping non-gay men, and even in the hypothetical case that that was an issue, one would think allowing them to marry would decrease the problem. Or could it be they are afraid of being "turned gay" or outed themselves?)
I used to think like you when I was a kid. Then I discovered reality is more nuanced and the science on this is surprisingly soft.
Nervous system morphology: yes, arthropods' nervous systems surely looks different from ours, with one large ganglion in the head and multiple somewhat smaller ganglia controlling motoric and digestive functions. But to conclude from this that they can't possibly feel pain is a huge leap of logic. An insect brain is organized much like a crustacean's brain, and a crustacean's brain is capable of complex behaviour. http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=clever-crustaceans
Nervous system organization: suppose you want to argue that our nervous system not only look different, but is organized differently, with everything centralized, as opposed to different ganglia taking care of different functions. Well, the differences are not that huge. Have you ever seen a freshly beheaded chicken? I can tell you, some of them run like hell - a sight so spooky that you won't easily forget it. This is because the act of running originates from the spinal cord, which is still there when you cut off the head. Similarly, it is speculated that the human spinal cord plays an important role in coordinating monotomous tasks such as walking. And the number of neurons associated with coordinating our digestive tract is larger then the number of neurons in a rat, and comes surprisingly close to the number of neurons in the cerebral cortex of a dog.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=gut-second-brain
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_animals_by_number_of_neurons#Cerebral_cortex
That bring us to Nervous system size. The above shows that a large structure of neurons is no guarantee for intelligence. On the other hand, there are many studies showing that corvids like crows and magpies show surprisingly intelligent behaviour on a smaller budget of neurons than our digestive system or a dog...
My point of all this is that neither brain size nor morphology or organization necessarily equates to complexity of function.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pain_in_invertebrates#Central_nervous_system
What does, then? We do not know! And we know even less whether bees can feel pain; nobody ever became a bee and wrote a book about it. The thought of not knowing this might feel threatening to your ethical preconceptions, but it's the hard truth! To make matters worse, the more we learn, the more it looks like some if not most invertebrates are able to experience pain at some level. Funny that we were just talking about administering electric shocks to honeybees: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pain_in_invertebrates#Conditioned_suppression
Now the interesting question is: how to build a system of ethics on this (lack of) knowledge. This I cannot answer for you, but the solution I use for myself is attributing gradual weights to the torture of different animals, with molluscs falling into the lowest tier, small insects a bit higher, large crustaceans a bit higher, birds and small mammals a bit higher and "intelligent" mammals even higher. The most important element of my system of ethics is that even the lowest tiers have a nonzero weight and torturing them for no good reason should be avoided.
Regardless of all the above soft ethics, there's a hard reason why "bee-tox" is a horrible idea. There already is a shortage of honeybees to the extent that fruit farmers start worrying about pollination:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Co
Oooh now I get it! You ACs are just like the Smurfs. Pedantic AC, First Post AC, Microsoft Shill AC, Ignorant AC, AWG Denialist AC, Treehuggin' Hippy AC, Crazy Libertarian AC,... And all the ACs that don't have specific names are just collectively referred to as "The Trolly ACs".
You must be new here.
Oops sorry, I was confusing "phlogiston theory" with something else - it's a long time ago since I encountered the term so I should have looked it up to refresh my memory. But my point is: there were a lot of theories predating present-day thermodynamics, all making increasingly accurate predictions. Industrial steam engines were ubiquitous by the time the concept entropy was introduced into the field of thermodynamics; the lack of this concept (which is the "universal driving force" in present-day thermodynamics) didn't stop these steam engines from working - within design specifications! So despite my ugly mistake, my main point that older theories made a lot of correct and valuable predictions still stands. No, this doesn't go for phlogiston theory, but comparing modern climate science with phlogiston theory was a very, very long shot to begin with. To claim otherwise would be to show a fatal lack of understanding of present-day science and scientific knowledge.
I was not referring to the building of new coal plants but to the increase in mining and burning of coal since the "panic shutdown" of most of the nuclear plants. And I admit it's a bad example for a lot of reasons; primarily that the increase can be seen as a temporary spike following decades of decrease, and that the percentage of German electricity that comes from coal is still way below the US. That's kinda my point. The EU is far ahead of the US by any reasonable measure yet has failed to return to the stone age as rally2xs asserted.
The USA has made the greatest headway into actually reducing CO2
Numbers or it's wrong.
Also, cap-and-trade did work very well for sulfur emissions - no end of the world as we know it. You're saying "it harms prosperity" yet I have seen nothing like that happening yet; what has been harming prosperity so far is a long recession that could perhaps have been avoided and that not even the most rabid oil industry lobbyist is blaming on environmentalists. They would just lose credibility. Like you - I finished reading your post concluding you're living in a fantasy world.
No, it is (most of) the denialists who are the Luddites, for denying that our current technology has the ability to mitigate the problem without significantly impacting society, and for opposing all progress in that direction.
Quantum mechanics is a bit new -- including it in your absurd list is dishonest as it hasn't had time to fail spectacularly like history suggests it will. Gravity: obvious examples are obvious. If you're particularly thick, just google "history of gravity". Atomic theory: dramatically changed several times pre and post Einstein. The atom today is so dramatically different from the atom in, say, 1850 that I'd say the science of the time was "spectacularly wrong". Thermodynamics: phlogiston, caloric theory, need I go on?
Shoot, I took the bait! Did I spring the trap?
Yes you did. All these "spectacularly wrong" theories you're quoting were remarkably accurate in predicting every-day observables. That's why they established a strong foothold before getting disproven by theories which got disproven in turn... based on increasingly far-fetched measurements as far as practical every-day life is concerned. Examples:
- One can be a successful structural or ballistic engineer using only Newton's laws of motion and gravity, no relativity needed
- Phlogiston and caloric theory explained and helped develop a host of working applications
- People may disagree on this one, but one can get quite far in, say, organic chemistry or molecular biology with very little knowledge of quantum mechanics. Really! This is my field of study.
We know our current climate models are not perfect. We also have good indications they get close enough for their predictions to be of practical value. In other news, the world is not black-and-white.
Still, these models were not without merit. Bohr's atom model made a whole array of remarkably accurate predictions, and is still being taught in schools because it's a useful tool for thinking about atoms and chemistry. If you think the current climate models are about as accurate as Bohr's atom model, then you'd better start working on a reduction in CO2 output or looking for real estate in a future hospitable region.
Also, the speed of sound was an engineering problem/challenge. If your engineering is not up to it, you'd better not go there. Airplanes have a Vne (never exceed speed), and for a while, it seemed like no amount of engineering could push this value into the transonic region. Exceeding the Vne is a common cause of accidents and deaths. If you want to use this as an (admittedly bad) analogy for climate change: since we don't have proven effective means of reducing global temperature to levels that won't have a grave impact on society, we'd better not go there. Or to add another generous scoop of hyperbole: will human civilization end up like this?
You might want to note the question mark. Not to mention reading a few posts up in the thread. GP brought in an argument GGP utterly failed to address, hence the quip.
Strawman, strawman and more strawman. No environmentalist I know has ever said we should stop producing CO2 overnight, not that we should go back to the stoneage. The real-life solutions are a bit more nuanced than what can be captured in a soundbite. For solutions that work, look at the EU as a whole. Yes, progress has been uneven both geographically and in time, with for example the current anti-nuclear scare in Germany leading to a shameful boom in coal power. But they're still emitting much less CO2 per capita than the US. And so does the EU as a whole, while having a similar spectrum of climate zones. And all the while, EU civilian infrastructure is being maintained much better and is generally more technologically advanced than what I see here in the US. I think we should coin a new term "CO2 reduction alarmist". Who is the alarmist now?
Yeah, probably I should have added this link to clarify the different "types" of gravity assist.
Um, that's not quite how orbital mechanics works. Helios II started off from the earth - that is, with a lot of potential energy in the sun's gravitational field. It was put into an elliptical orbit around the sun, so on its closest approach, part of that potential energy was converted to kinetic energy (hence the high velocity), but at the most distant point, it's all converted back to potential energy, and there's zero gain. It's a bit like bouncing a rubber ball off the floor: it's surely going to hit the ground at a high velocity, but it's never going to bounce up higher than it started - no free lunch. The reason why slingshotting between planets works is because they move relative to each other. To use the rubber ball analogy again, if you throw a rubber ball at the front of a truck that is rapidly approaching you, the rubber ball will come back with a higher velocity. What you did is subtracting kinetic energy from the truck, just like a slingshotting probe subtracts kinetic energy from a moving planet. The tricks we use to make space probes gain kinetic energy are not unlike bouncing a rubber ball repeatedly between moving walls. To use the sun for slingshotting, one would require a very massive object in a highly eccentric orbit around the sun as a "second wall", which our solar system unfortunately doesn't have. (Or should that be: fortunately for our existence?) One could try to use pluto, but I doubt it's massive, eccentric and fast enough to be worth it.
Disclaimer: the above explanation is obviously somewhat oversimplified.
I call bullshit on this whole story. The letter frequencies are nicely consistent with a random OTP and woefully inconsistent with shorthand (which Mr. Young claims it is). 6 Q's, 4 X's and 4 Z's as opposed to 5 T's and 4 E's? Gee, there must have been a lot of Queens, Xylophones and Zebra's involved in that war! This alone is sufficient to sink the whole claim. And then there's the little problem that the story is shock full of holes:
- Mr Young claims they're using WWI-era codes. What makes him think this would be tolerated, in a war in which both sides were heavily reliant on encryption and codebreaking?
- A WWII artillery observer using carrier pigeons? Seriously??? We're talking about a very mobile war, with widely available radio equipment, and during which radar, jet engines, ballistic and guided missiles, and the atom bomb were invented. By the time the pigeon found home, the target could have moved 100miles. Yes, carrier pigeons were still used, but mainly in a backup capacity, and most certainly not for artillery observation missions.
- Why would the official codes use "panzers" and "jerries" as opposed to "tanks" and "germans/enemy"? Also, I'm not sure the word "blitz" was colloquial in allied countries before the end of the war. And it's used in a wrong context.
- "Counter Measures [against] Panzers Not Working?" There's so much wrong with that sentence I wouldn't know where to start. Not to mention all the other sentences he "decrypted". The guy has a lot of fantasy, I give him that.
Wicked! So it does actually have a chance of working, then. Wikipedia even claims that it would have benefits for society.
Your country must be more civilized. Where I live, the freeloaders are everywhere.
Now you're sounding like the populist politicians and the bitter working-class people complaining in the pubs. What you need to do is show statistics indicating that your government's budget is being brought onto its knees by unemployment benefits. I'm not saying there exists no country for which this is the case, but I'm pretty sure it isn't the case for any of the Northern European countries I was talking about, contrary to pervasive public perception.
You start at $0.00, and work for your money.
In order for the system I was talking about to work, the unemployment benefits should be far enough below the minimum wage to motivate a large enough percentage of people to work (which means relatively high minimum wages). In practice, it is not that simple, and there will always be groups of exceptions. But this condition is largely fulfilled in most functioning welfare societies, again, despite pervasive public perception to the contrary. If you will argue that it isn't the case for your country, by all means, but please do provide a statistic. Keeping in mind that anecdotes are not a statistics; as I said, there will and should be groups of exceptions.
Your "you start at $0.00" brings us to a fascinating (if somewhat offtopic) aspect of the discussion. There is a political fringe group in the European Union that argues that everyone should receive the same basic unemployment package, whether they work or not. The package would allow people to have a healthy life, but not much luxury (small dwellings, no car, not all the latest newest gadgets,...) If you want to bring some luxury into your life, get a job. Labor would be very cheap for the employer because they don't need to pay you a full wage, only the difference between the baseline and a more wealthy lifestyle. The government would get all the money to pay everyone's baseline from very high VAT. This VAT would apply to imported goods, but not to goods that are exported and sold on other markets, which again would make manufacturing very competitive. Now I haven't performed or encountered a full economic analysis of this scheme, and I'm taking these people's claims that the scheme is vetted by economists with a huge grain of salt. So I don't know what to make out of it, but here are a couple of random thoughts:
- Very high VAT would spawn a flourishing black market. The economic force behind this black market may (or may not) be strong enough to make the whole scheme collapse.
- Possibly a more feasible way to get the money would be a combination of VAT and tax on production. I strongly suspect a working combination would be a VAT rate close to present-day welfare states, and the remaining tax on production would make your industries just as competitive as present-day welfare states (not very competitive but hanging in there, that is). You're just swapping labor costs and tax on labor for tax on production, and the outcome would not be all that different.
- The most interesting part of this cranky scheme comes in when one considers a future society with advanced AI and robotics, in which a lot of work can be done by robots. A large percentage of people would be unemployed; it seems logical to somehow pay them from the money made by factories that are largely human-free. Otherwise, what good is human-free production if nobody can buy the goods?
- Hypothetical counterpoint: people will always find a way to offer a service that other people will want to pay for, and no amount of technological advancement will change that. Think of the massive entertainment industry, which was largely nonexistent (or at least way smaller) in pre-industrial society.
Again I'm neither in favor or against this scheme, and I'm not sure of the truth value of all the above arguments. At this point, I just see it as a fascinating thought experiment. I guess I'll make up my mind once more information is available.</offtopic>
Where did you ever get the idea that the probability is 100%? It is very very close to 100%, yet there's an unimaginably small but nonzero chance that the sun will swallow the earth before the latter is hit by the next big asteroid. Unless of course you believe in some kind of prophecy that the earth will be hit by a big asteroid, then you're right... within the framework of your belief system. Which you should have stated before wasting our time on this discussion.
I think you underestimate the impact of greed, strife and group-think. It's basically what consumerist/capitalist society is built on. You bombard people the whole day with advertisements that all carry the same message: If you buy this, you will be happy. [Take-home message: money creates happiness.] You will be superior to your neighbor who doesn't have it. Or go ahead and don't buy it, but you will be ridiculed and feel inferior and unhappy. These messages fall on fertile ground: they trigger people's instinctive tendencies to appear superior as to attract a better mate. Few people can resist these base tendencies, leave alone the tsunami of adverts enforcing them. If this wasn't true, rich people would retire to enjoy life once they hit the $10M mark.
Surely, there will be some freeloaders, but so what? All they're doing is sidetracking themselves from society (and who knows, maybe one or two of them will turn out to be great artists). As long as that free shack is not overly luxurious, the number of freeloaders won't be too big, and society can handle it. That's why all these socialist countries in Northern Europe with their elaborate social safety net and unemployment benefits show no signs of collapsing (no, Greece is not in Northern Europe and is not a good example; what really brought Greece down is corruption and uncontrolled spending and also corruption and a bit of corruption.) Working-class people will be complaining in the pubs about the freeloaders, but in truth, they're really not a threat as long as their numbers are kept low by motivating them to get a job.
Here's also the big distinction between Communism and modern-day western-European Socialism (or let's use the less ambiguous term Social democracy). Communism does not sufficiently allow/motivate people to "become more" than their neighbor, thus denying human nature; therefore, it is doomed to fail. On the other extreme end of the spectrum, you have the laissez-faire doctrine of economic liberalism, as embodied in the US by ultralibertarianism, neoliberalism and neoconservatism - yes, that's all the major present-day US political movements with the (largely irrelevant) exception of the greens. This is also doomed to fail: throughout history, wealth has always found a way to aggregate, and a society that is not set up to effectively counterbalance this aggregation will eventually destabilize itself (ie. the poor and powerless will riot against the rich and powerful). As a result of all US political movements going full throttle for laissez-faire economic liberalism, income inequality in the US is at its highest value since a long time (and so is money's political influence). In my opinion, this is the single biggest threat to the USA and everything it stands for. The stable point lies in-between communism and laissez-faire capitalism. Progressive taxes are a large part of this because they promote a large middle class layer - people who have spending power (as opposed to the poor) and are motivated to spend all their money (as opposed to the rich). The associated turnover of money is the water that flows trough the waterwheel of a healthy economy.
*gets off soapbox*
Fine, if you're one of those people who are not willing to accept that the decisions we make are the results of the firing of our neurons, which is governed by cold, hard and well-understood physics, then just forget about the coin toss and focus on the lottery machine. I can give you the positions and velocities of the balls, the timings, and any other parameters you need with a 10^-5 relative error, and you still won't be able to predict the outcome even with the best simulation software. Why? Because it's a chaotic system, and a 10^-6 error can completely change to outcome. And guess what is also a chaotic system? Orbital mechanics. You can predict it a little bit into the future, but the further you go forward in time, the more the arbitrary small errors in your initial measurements are amplified, and after a certain time, it's just all random for practical purposes.
However, all of this is missing the point. What really matters (which you yet again conveniently ignored), is that
(1) the distribution of the outcomes can pass for random
(2) we can't predict the outcomes
These are sufficient conditions to approach the outcome as random for practical purposes. You already conceded (2), and as for (1), as I pointed out in another post, physics and statistics says that there should be no periodicity in large meteor strikes on the time scales we're talking about. The available geological data seems to confirm this. Up to you to demonstrate statistically significant periodicity. And get it published in Science or Nature.
I apologize if my reply was a bit harsh. Being a professional scientist myself, I seem to have lost at least some of my ability to simplify matters for the sake of broad understanding, or recognize it when others do. And indeed, what you said was strictly spoken not wrong, it just wasn't the complete picture or the point I was trying to make.
Yummy actually. If you've never eaten a real salami (ie. one that has been subjected to controlled fermentation), then you simply don't know what salami is supposed to taste like.
Yes, and the energy wasted by an inefficient power supply is likewise 100% converted to energy. But the thing is: a heat pump can go higher than 100%: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_pump#Coefficient_of_performance_.28COP.29_and_lift It can do that because it's not a closed system - it pulls heat from outside (yes, even though it's colder outside) to inside in addition to dissipating electric energy.
As for the burning, well if you're lucky to live in a place of the world with a large percentage of renewable electricity, you can always argue that consuming electricity is better. But a lot of electricity in the world is generated by burning stuff, and the conversion of heat to electricity is limited by the Carnot efficiency, so right there, you're wasting more heat than what goes up the chimney at home (unless you're doing cogeneration). And then there are also the (admittedly smaller) losses caused by carrying that electricity through several kilometers of copper cables.